Ana Cristina Sepúlveda is the Head of the XBRL Team at the Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros (SVS), the Chilean securities and insurance supervisor, and oversaw the development of the SVS CL-CI 2008 XBRL taxonomy. She is currently working on the development of this taxonomy for reporting in 2010.

The SVS, Chile’s equivalent of the SEC, decided in 2005 that International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) would be adopted for financial reporting; implementation began this year for those mpanies whose stocks are most actively traded on Chile’s securities market. These firms have already submitted their financial statements for quarters ended March 31 and June 30, and all other rporate issuers of securities will begin to report in IFRS next year.

Development of an XBRL taxonomy for IFRS in Chile began in January 2008. The SVS team mprised members of both the IT and financial departments of the agency. The going was initially tough: it was the first time that the team had had ntact with XBRL, and we had to absorb its rules and devise methods to work with it suessfully. These difficulties were exacerbated by the many changes in IFRS during the 2006-2008 period. Our team included several acunting professionals and their views often differed on what disclosures were required under IFRS. Resolving these disagreements and obtaining nsensus took some time.

Finally, in October 2008, the SVS released the SVS CL-CI 2008-10-31 XBRL Taxonomy for reporting of financial statements under IFRS. The new taxonomy is an extension of the IFRS General Purpose Financial Reporting (IFRS-GP) taxonomy for 2006, the latest version at the time the SVS taxonomy was created, and has been updated acrding to the 2008 Bound Volume. 

The current SVS CL-CI XBRL Taxonomy represents the legal regulations (IFRS as well as Chilean GAAP) applicable when the taxonomy was released. It nsists of a single schema file that imports IFRS-GP elements and defines additional ncepts. The SVS CL-CI XBRL Taxonomy uses 2,636 IFRS-GP ncepts, of which about 2,490 are non-abstract items. It does not use the presentation and calculation relationships defined in the IFRS-GP. It does use all elements of the IFRS-GP 2006 taxonomy that were still in force and ignores that do not serve current needs. Additionally, we created 1,087 elements to fulfill requirements under the new rules.

However, we do not use certain structures from the IFRS-GP 2006 taxonomy, including notes to the financial statements required by asset, liability, and inme statement disclosures; inme statement classes; and so forth. Instead, we chose to use the presentation linkbase from the 2008 IFRS Taxonomy for disclosures required by IAS or IFRS.

In essence, although the SVS CL-CI Taxonomy is an extension of the 2006 version of the IFRS-GP Taxonomy, its architecture is based on the IFRS 2008 Taxonomy. Additionally, the taxonomy has been modularized standard by standard and regulation by regulation based on IFRS and Chilean GAAP. Each standard has been anized in mponents of the report (statements, notes, and disclosures).

There has been resistance to these changes inside the financial department, and it has been hard for our analysts to aept the new information model. They did not like the presentation of disclosures as required by IAS and IFRS, which represented a substantial change from how disclosures have historically been handled in Chilean financial statements. On the other hand, the new information model has made it easier to prepare financial statements, because it ntains every disclosure required by IFRS rules, and there are clear references to where to go and what to do. Against that positive, however, it should be said that the new model is more mplex. We have received criticisms from mpanies that too much detail is being asked of Chilean mpanies, which often don’t have readily available the information that’s now required.

During the taxonomy development period, the team prepared a webpage to report about the project and developed tools to help mpanies use the taxonomy. We also created a “taxonomy explorer,” which is useful to review the taxonomy, the presentation linkbase, the elements, and all the references. We have offered workshops for mpanies to give them some basic knowledge of XBRL and to enurage them to generate their financial statements in XBRL files.

Nevertheless, the first submission of XBRLized financial statements by mpanies was difficult. We intended to offer a tool which would enable mpanies to enter the required XBRL information and generate their XBRL files. But this attempt proved to be a mistake, and we had many problems in actual practice. We now require mpanies to generate their own financial statements and not use the interactive form. (pany financial statements are available on the SVS web)

In addition, there have been the start-up problems you’d expect where mpany staffs have had little background working with IFRS and XBRL. We receive many technical queries, such as how to indicate a particular element and how to deal with tuples using certain software.

The truth is that each time new software has been implemented, there have been new problems. Startup is always hard. At the beginning there is lack of knowledge and resistance to change; but as people learn, they embrace the new standards. When we first started there were no experts in XBRL, but with the current requirements (and hence demand) for XBRLized financial statements, many software vendors have developed tools for the generation of XBRL files from within mpanies’ own systems. The SVS team is now working on the taxonomy for next year’s filings, which will be an extension from the IFRS Taxonomy 2009.